Baghdad is Falling

When President Barack Obama removed the last U.S. forces
from Iraq in December 2011, he announced that—as he had planned—the U.S. was
leaving behind a “sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a
representative government.”

It was a “moment of success,” he said.

On Feb. 27, 2009, a little more than a month after his first
inauguration, Obama gave a speech at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina that the
White House entitled, “Responsibly Ending the War in Iraq.”

Obama said then that his strategy was based on the
“achievable goal” of a “sovereign, stable and self-reliant” Iraq–and that he
intended to withdraw all U.S. forces from Iraq by the end of 2011, as had been
envisioned in the Status of Forces agreement negotiated by the Bush
Administration.

Video: Carney Argues Iraq And “Decimating” Al-Qaeda Are
Still Obama’s Top Accomplishments

Three cheers for Obama, “Obama akbar! Obama akbar! Obama
akbar!”

Telegraph:
Iraq is breaking up. The Kurds have taken the northern oil city of Kirkuk that
they have long claimed as their capital. Sunni fundamentalist fighters vow to
capture Baghdad and the Shia holy cities further south.

Government rule over the Sunni Arab heartlands of north and
central Iraq is evaporating as its 900,000-strong army disintegrates.
Government aircraft have fired missiles at insurgent targets in Mosul, captured
by Isis on Monday, but the Iraqi army has otherwise shown no sign of launching
a counter-attack.

The nine-year Shia dominance over Iraq, established after
the US, Britain and other allies overthrew Saddam Hussein, may be coming to an
end. The Shia may continue to hold the capital and the Shia-majority provinces
further south, but they will have great difficulty in re-establishing their
authority over Sunni provinces from which their army has fled.

It is unlikely that the Kurds will give up Kirkuk. “The
whole of Kirkuk has fallen into the hands of peshmerga [Kurdish soldiers],”
said the peshmerga spokesman Jabbar Yawar. “No Iraqi army remains in Kirkuk.”

Foreign intervention is more likely to come from Iran than
the US. The Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said that Iran would act to combat
“the violence and terrorism” of Isis”. Iran emerged as the most influential
foreign power in Baghdad after 2003. As a fellow Shia-majority state, Iraq
matters even more to Iran than Syria.

Iran will be deeply alarmed by the appearance of a
fanatically Sunni proto-state hostile to all Shia in western Iraq and eastern
Syria. Abu Mohamed al-Adnani, the Isis spokesman, said today that the Shia, 60
per cent of the Iraqi population, “are a disgraced people”, accusing them of
being “polytheists”.

Iraq’s Shia may well conclude that their army has failed
them and they must once again rely on militias like the Mehdi Army which was
responsible for the slaughter of Sunni in 2005 and 2006. At that time, much of
Baghdad was cleansed of Sunni. The loss of Baghdad has never been forgotten or
forgiven by Sunni states such as Saudi Arabia, which has long hoped to reverse
the Shia dominance in Iraq.